DESIGN

DESIGN; Minding the Store

By Carol Vogel

Published: July 30, 1989

In an age when architects and designers have achieved celebrity status, Naomi Leff thrives on anonymity. When she walks into Ralph Lauren's flagship store - the renovated Rhinelander Mansion at Madison Avenue and 72d Street -she is just another customer.

No one suspects that this simply but elegantly dressed redhead knows every inch of the building's 22,000 square feet. And even if her name were announced, few would know that she was the designer who turned the 1898 neo-classical structure into one of Manhattan's top tourist attractions.

Leff doesn't mind, because the client is happy. And he should be. In realizing Lauren's fantasy - to create a mini-department store that combined the elements of an English stately home and a gentleman's club - Leff helped set the stage for perhaps the greatest retailing success story of the decade. ''There's nothing I love more than a client with a dream,'' she says, seated in a sensible swivel chair in the black and ivory conference room of her Manhattan office. ''But it has to be a tangible fantasy, not a kooky one people can't relate to.''

The Lauren-Leff partnership began in 1982, when, shortly after Lauren began designing his home furnishings line for J.P. Stevens, the company held a competition inviting designers to submit schemes for Lauren showrooms. Leff entered and won, creating a series of dreamy, luxurious environments that included a steamy Jamaican bedroom, complete with ceiling fans, and a proper Englishman's dressing room.

The Rhinelander Mansion was a different order of magnitude and complexity. ''It was more like three projects in one,'' says Leff, ''preservation, retailing and renovation.'' Over the years, 32 commercial tenants had carved up the building so thoroughly that it was impossible to tell it had once been a single-family house - yet that sense of a private home is precisely what Lauren wanted to recreate. Transforming the landmark building required a construction crew that at one point totaled 400, including a hundred craftsmen and a dozen historical consultants.

Leff rebuilt the ornate limestone facade to evoke the mansion's appearance before it went commercial in the 1920's. Inside, she says, ''the trick was to keep all the rooms residential in scale and in the original spirit of the building.'' Leff consulted the few original plans still existing, and, by digging into the bowels of the building, pieced together the rest. Upon removing the gigantic air conditioning units that had been buried in the middle of the house, she uncovered the site of the original staircase. She then designed a grand mahogany stair that looks as though it has always been there. The ornamental plasterwork, which also appears to be original, was recast from surviving fragments.

Leff learned retail design from the inside out. She spent five years at John Carl Warnecke/ Eleanor Le Maire Associates, where she worked primarily with Carter Hawley Hale, then owners of Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman. ''I had the opportunity to supervise every kind of trade, from plumbing to millwork,'' she says.

In 1975, Leff took a job in Bloomingdale's store-design department. ''In those days, the design of new stores as well as the renovation of old ones was done in-house,'' she says. ''It was a great education. I dealt with everyone from the chairman of the board to the assistant buyer who wanted to know why her sweaters weren't selling.''

After four years, however, Leff struck out on her own to form Naomi Leff & Associates. At first, the business specialized in retail accounts, but as the number of her commissions has grown, so has their scope. One client, Shearson Lehman Hutton, hired her to design a 55,000-square-foot conference center in Beaver Creek, Colo.. The complex, which resembles a luxury ski resort, includes complete spa facilities and 12 separate sleeping units. Its cozy stone fireplaces, butternut woodwork and American antiques give it, as Leff readily admits, the never-never-land quality of a Ralph Lauren advertisement. Even more unusual was a recent commission to design the interiors for three corporate jets.

Unlike most architects and designers, who insist on putting a personal stamp on their work, Leff doesn't mind laboring in the shadow of her clients, and she is reluctant to identify many of her largest accounts. ''The work itself is what's important,'' she says.

Leff and her staff of 35 are now working on such projects as the Leonard Lauders' Manhattan apartment and Ralph Lauren's home in Bedford, N.Y. (She also helped with his Colorado ranch.) On the boards are other retail projects: the national prototype for a group of Anne Klein stores, a Ralph Lauren store in Philadelphia, the prototype for a Saks Fifth Avenue Real Clothes boutique and the design for three Holt Renfrew stores in Canada.

A consistent spirit runs through all Leff's work. Her projects have an inviting quality that comes from the combination of beautiful craftsmanship and sensible space planning. (For the Saks Real Clothes boutique, Leff will create a simple American look with sales counters in the form of round Shaker boxes, right down to the triangular swallowtail joints.) ''When I was a graduate student at Pratt, I took a course called 'What Is Art?' '' Leff recalls. ''Toward the end of the semester I summoned up the courage to ask the professor how he defined art. I've never forgotten his answer: 'Art is what makes you feel good.' ''